SharePoint Gets (Mostly) Top Marks

By Microsoft standards, SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 1.0 wasn't exactly a
barn-burner, so the company had high hopes for SPS 2003, a revamped version
of the portal and team collaboration environment released last year. Based on
the experiences of early adopters, the new iteration just might catch fire.

SPS 2003 boasts tight integration with Office 2003, a revamped user interface
(UI), new features that help users more easily navigate SharePoint sites and
SQL Server integration. The product does present a somewhat steep administrative
learning curve, and upgrading from SPS 1.0 is no chip shot due to a lack of
migration tools and new .NET underpinnings. But the experiences of several adopters
suggest that, after adding up the pluses and minuses, SPS 2003 comes out solidly
in the black.

The consensus among users we surveyed is that SPS 1.0 lacks many common usability features and frequently requires the intervention of IT personnel to perform mundane tasks, such as the delegation of users or content owners.

That's a significant problem given that SharePoint is intended to make it easy for users to share and collaborate on documents by publishing them to internal Web sites that they create on the fly. The product also includes knowledge management and document management features.

Staffing and Training
Maintenance—particularly with respect to staffing requirements—is one area in which adopters can wring significant cost savings out of SPS 2003 vis-à-vis its predecessor. "Typically IT gets it up and running and hands over the keys," says Mauro Cardarelli, a consultant with systems integrator Knowledge Management Inc. "SPS does not require dedicated [IT human] resources." Because data can be split among many different owners in the SPS 2003 model, he says, "the time spent updating content is only a small fraction of job responsibilities."

David Lowe, a consultant with systems integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Intellinet, agrees. SPS 2003 allows IT organizations to "delegate adding users and content down to the department, division or even the user level," he says, whereas its predecessor required IT intervention to accomplish these tasks.

David Goebel, a SharePoint administrator with the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (CUIAB), paints a somewhat less rosy administration picture. He recently completed an upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 1.0 to SPS 2003 on a four-way Dell Xeon box supporting 900 users. While he is indeed the only administrator overseeing CUIAB's SPS 2003 migration effort, he has his hands full.

"There are a ton of admin screens for settings, security, etc. I've been working with them for the past six months and I still don't know exactly how many admin screens there are and where they're all located," says Goebel. "Administration [in SPS 2003] is a fairly difficult task."

As the only admin minding a 900-person SharePoint 2003 implementation, David Goebel has his hands full.

While SPS 2003 may present a significant learning curve for administrators, the opposite is the case for end users, says Jeff Centimano, a principal consultant with system integrator Levi, Ray & Shoup Inc. "Training—or lack thereof—is my favorite thing about SharePoint. With absolutely no training at all a user can navigate the basic functions of SharePoint and find what they need," he says. "With a quick 30-minute lunch and learn session we have empowered customer staff with enough knowledge to post content, contribute to discussions, and even modify basic Web Parts." Web Parts let users build and customize Web pages in SharePoint sites.

It does take a high degree of coordination to realize the full benefit of SPS 2003, however. "Proper planning at installation time with your infrastructure team, DBA, Web design team, content owners and a professional consultant will ensure your IT department is not spending time updating the portal," Lowe says.

Kenton Gardinier, a senior consultant with IT staffing specialist Convergent Computing, says IT must also solicit input from business users during the SPS planning phases, to ensure that business needs map to technical requirements. "Business units and IT must work closely together on most issues, including sizing the solution, developing the user interface, setting user expectations, integrating outside sources of information and much more," he says.

Integration Galore
Users and consultants alike laud the tight ties between the revamped SharePoint
product and Office 2003, including tighter coupling with Outlook 2003 and Word
2003. One upshot of this is that many SharePoint features—such as meeting
workspaces and share attachments—are seamlessly integrated into Outlook,
such that some users aren't even aware they're using a separate application,
Lowe says. In the same way, he notes, SPS 2003 installs a "Shared Workspace"
task pane in Excel 2003, Word 2003 and other Office applications, which enables
users to collaborate and share documents "with little or no interaction
with the IT staff."

SPS Migration Tips

Mauro Cardarelli, a consultant with
systems integrator Knowledge Management Inc., offered these
best practices for those migrating from SharePoint Portal
Server 1.0 to SPS 2003, but the tips can also apply to day-to-day
SPS administration.

Pre-allocate database sizes to minimize
the number of times the databases will have to expand.

Use separate volumes for data and transaction
logs. Allocate approximately 13 percent to 15 percent
of the data volume's size to the transaction log volume.

Consider disabling document versioning.

— Stephen Swoyer

Lowe is smitten with SPS 2003's revamped Web Parts infrastructure. Web Parts
is built on top of ASP.NET and provides a .NET object model that contains classes
that derive from and extend ASP.NET classes, Lowe says. Users can add Web Parts
at runtime, assuming that they have permission to do so, and enable a variety
of scenarios, such as:

The creation of sites and pages

Management of the site user roster

Storage of Web Part customizations, including shared and personal property
settings

Administration of site backups and storage limits

Assignment of users to customizable site groups

Lowe is also keen on SPS 2003's new "My Site" feature. My Site provides
a repository—clearly accessible from the SharePoint UI—in which users
can store content and control who can access it. "This makes it quite simple
for non-technical users to contribute to the portal without even knowing the
complex posting action taking place in the background," he says. "This
personal site has a private storage area for personal content and work in progress,
as well as a public storage area for easily sharing the projects and documents
they are working on." The personal site includes some AD profile information,
providing information to others about each user's role.

Indeed, Gardinier gives SPS 2003 high marks for its integration with AD, noting
the two tie together easily and that SPS is flexible in terms of what information
it can pull from the directory. "For instance, it has the ability to pull
from not only the entire directory but also from select containers like an Organizational
Unit," he says.

Knowledge Management's Cardarelli, for his part, insists that SPS 2003's best new feature is a no-brainer: "[The] SQL Server backend—it adds scalability and allows IT folks to see and access all the data directly."

Migration Experiences and Lessons Learned
Based on feedback from users who have done so, organizations mulling SPS 2003 upgrades should expect to encounter a hitch or two.

CUIAB's Goebel, for example, says his ongoing SPS 2003 migration has been "difficult," mainly because of the absence of built-in migration tools. "Testing the migration process and then getting the new portal to match the look and feel of our existing portal has taken six months," he says. "We're going to simulate the entire upgrade process multiple times until we can execute the upgrade without a problem."

Some users reported issues with Microsoft's downloadable migration tools, "Spin" and "Spout"—or, more properly, SPIN.EXE and SPOUT.EXE—which are designed to automate the process of exporting data from SharePoint 1.0 and importing it into SPS 2003. Spout exports the version history of legacy SharePoint sites into XML or flat file formats, while Spin imports SPS Areas or Windows SharePoint Services document libraries. For many users, the tools work as advertised. But others complain of lengthy import/export times and Microsoft's own USENET groups are littered with the carcasses of Spin and Spout migration efforts that somehow went awry.

These tools, while undeniably important, don't address a range of migration
issues, such as the requirement that organizations re-code their SharePoint
1.0 Web Parts for SPS 2003 and its new .NET underpinnings (see "SPS Migration
Tips"). As a result, says Lowe, the dreaded "P" word—planning, and
plenty of it—is critical to the success of any large SharePoint migration.
"All tools, including Microsoft's Spin and Spout, have issues," he says,
suggesting—ever philosophically, "It's a great time to do a serious
purge of your content and documentation."

Security
Users give SPS 2003 high marks for security, with Cardelli pointing specifically to the use of IIS authentication and role-based security as solid features. But he also has a few nits to pick. One is that users can see some links they don't have access to and get a pop-up requesting credentials. "Microsoft says it is for performance, but most find it very annoying," he says.

Similarly, Goebel says that he's both pleased and a little overwhelmed by SPS 2003's security features. "There's a lot of security all over the place and it takes time to figure out where what I'm looking for is."

Lowe points out that, at the portal level, you can only set security on an area, not the document library or file level. "But in fairness, the product's a collaboration tool and [is designed to] lend itself to sharing of information," he says.

In Search of ROI
Most SPS 2003 adopters haven't commissioned return-on-investment studies, but expect there's substantial ROI to be had. For example, says Cardarelli, once an IT organization implements SPS 2003 and brings its personnel up to speed on its new management features—no mean feat, as we've seen—it's a mostly turn-key environment. In this respect, he says, IT can effectively "hand-off" SPS 2003 to business users.

"We help clients split data ownership responsibilities, based on content. The interface is so easy to use it truly becomes a community-run tool," Cardarelli says. "There is no burden on any one person or group to maintain the portal. The [total cost of ownership] is minimized through the easy administration and the natural dissection of content."

Of course you can't get any ROI from new software if employees won't use it. At CIUAB, the original SPS fared pretty well in that respect. "Users really like it for the most part and use it regularly," Goebel says. Given SPS 2003's surfeit of user-friendly features, such as MySite and Shared Workspace, he expects the follow-up will be a smash. Such features allow users to collaborate more effectively, with minimal intervention from IT, resulting in productivity gains for both groups.

Cardarelli identifies several common SPS 2003 ROI benefits, starting with more efficient information reuse. Users often waste large chunks of time searching for documents and other resources on local or network file shares. In an SPS 2003 environment, the same searches take just seconds, thanks to SharePoint's integrated search facility. SPS 2003 can also help reduce e-mail traffic by eliminating the round-robin exchanges that occur when a user is looking for a document that addresses a particular issue. Finally, features like the SharePoint "Announcements List" (which provides a channel for broadcasting information to users), along with standardized templates, can bolster corporate branding efforts by ensuring consistency of corporate messaging.

All in all, SPS 2003 adopters say that the revamped SharePoint is a worthy
upgrade to the occasionally frustrating SPS 1.0.

More Information

More Thoughts on SPS 2003

Additional musings on a variety of topics from users interviewed for our story
"SharePoint Gets (Mostly) Top Marks."

Bandwidth Usage
With the exception of Levi, Ray & Shoup's Centimano, few users raised any
concerns about SPS 2003's bandwidth requirements. Centimano, however, has found
that SharePoint's sizeable Java Script files can bedevil dial-up users. "The
Java Script files that drive the SharePoint menus are quite large. The OWS.JS
file is 400KB by itself," he says. "The only solution we know of is
to host SharePoint using Terminal Services for dial-in users."

Centimano is thinking about instructing clients to use a third-party software
tool that can compress Java script files. That, he says, will "hopefully
make the site usable over dial-up without Terminal Services."

Storage
Most users didn't have much to say about SPS 2003's storage requirements --
with the exception of Convergent Computing's Gardinier, who cautions that organizations
need to carefully plan their SPS storage infrastructure. "Any organization
planning to use SPS as a document management solution should allot ample time
for planning and design," he says. "Otherwise, storage requirements
and costs will quickly [become] overwhelming."

Regardless of whether you're upgrading from an earlier version of SPS or implementing
SharePoint for the first time, Gardinier suggests several strategies to help
minimize your data storage requirements. "Consider this a time for house
cleaning. Just because the files exist on some share doesn't necessarily mean
that they must be incorporated into SPS," he says. "Map the number
of sites to storage requirements and limit content with site quotas. For example,
if sites are created on a per project basis and the typical project requires
close to 100MB of data, consider limiting each site to 100MB. The storage requirement
is then simply multiplying the number of sites with the limit."

User Wish Lists
Knowledge Management's Cardarelli would love to see Microsoft implement a workflow
process for document approval. And although Microsoft significantly retooled
the SharePoint UI in SPS 2003, Cardarelli says there's still more work to be
done, starting with a more intuitive search interface. Similarly, he adds, while
SPS 2003's native backup and restore facility is a welcome addition, it would
be more useful if administrators could schedule backups with it, too.

Convergent Computing's Gardinier seconds Cardarelli's workflow thoughts. "Microsoft
should incorporate at least basic workflow capabilities into the next release
or service pack," he says, noting that "there are excellent third-party
products" that address these shortcomings, such as SmartLibrary from Nintex.

Before Microsoft introduces bi-directional read and write integration between
SharePoint and Active Directory, Goebel wants it to fix an annoying navigational
quirk. "Allow admins the ability to change [or] customize the left-hand
navigation," he pleads. "For example, when a user clicks into a sub
area, the navigation should still continue to show the other sub areas so the
user can cross-navigate. The current format drops the user down a level, but
they have to click back up to get the other sub areas again."

Intellinet's Lowe wants Microsoft to improve interoperability between SPS 2003
and the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) add-on it announced last year for
Windows Server 2003. Microsoft positions WSS as a light weight version of SPS
2003 that's suitable for information sharing and collaboration among small teams.
"The relationship between Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal
needs more of an automated connection," he says. "When deleting WSS
sites you have to manually change or delete any listings that point to the deleted
site."

In environments where WSS and SPS 2003 are deployed side-by-side, performance
problems abound, says Lowe. "With large document libraries, it takes much
longer than expected to crawl content contained in Sharepoint Services Web sites,"
he says. "Since [WSS] generates a query for each document that is to be
indexed, when there are a large number of documents, query performance decreases,
and longer than expected for SharePoint Portal Server to crawl and index the
documents."

Backup
SPS 2003 includes a built in back-up facility that should be all most organizations
need, says Intellinet's Lowe. "You can back up and restore a server farm,
a portal, or individual components of a SharePoint Portal Server deployment
by using the SharePoint Portal Server Data Backup and Restore tool," he
says. However, he notes the native SPS 2003 tool can't restore SharePoint databases
to their original servers. For example, if you back up portal data in a SPS
2003 server farm with one database server, you can't restore this data to the
original database. Instead, you must bring up a new database server and restore
the backup to that.

The good news, Lowe says, is that there's a work-around: "[P]rovision
a non-configuration database on the original server, and then restore the databases
to the servers that you want in the server farm."

Better still, vendors such as Computer Associates and Veritas offer SharePoint
agents for their popular enterprise backup tools. For users who are dissatisfied
with the native SharePoint backup tools, these should be a superior, if considerably
more expensive, option.

.NET Infrastructure
Lowe is smitten with SPS 2003's revamped Web Parts infrastructure, which lets
users build and customize Web pages in SharePoint sites. Web Parts is built
on top of ASP.NET and provides a .NET object model that contains classes that
derive from and extend ASP.NET classes, Lowe says. Web Parts can be added by
users at runtime, assuming that they have permission to do so, and enable a
variety of scenarios, such as the creation of new sites and new pages; management
of the user roster for a site; storage of Web Part customizations, including
shared and personal property settings; administration of site backups and storage
limits; and assignment of users to customizable site groups.— Stephen Swoyer